I hate airports. Yet it feels like I spend half my life in them - and in fact during times of snow in Chicago or fog in San Francisco I do. For years I traveled for work because I was a journalist and for fun because I was nuts. These days I write travel guidebooks and have the dubious pleasure of enjoying airports worldwide. In most cases, they suck.

Passengers pay for airports with fees hidden in their tickets. They are captive customers. Can they take their business elsewhere? Rarely. Can they protest the user charges hidden in their airfares? No. Can they negotiate themselves a better deal? Of course not. And if they try, security will be called and it's a trip to Gitmo for sure.

Airlines aren't going to help airport-bedeviled passengers either. They want to pay the airport as little as possible to use it, so they're happy for passengers to be endlessly bilked. "That'll be $100 for parking, $15 for that repulsive lunch, $10 for a small beer, etc." And Smartcarts? At $3 to use something that should be free, they should be called "Total Idiot Carts."

Coupled with the rip-offs is bad service. I use two simple criteria to rate airports: can I buy a newspaper and is there a nice, relaxing place to sit and wait for my (no doubt delayed) flight. These are not grand aspirations but I'm amazed at how many airports fail both. In Taipei recently I hunted fruitlessly for a paper, airport staff were puzzled at the concept. In Bangkok's new Suvarnabhumi airport – for which the word abominable isn't pejorative enough - I asked the smiling people at the information desk where I could find the "passenger waiting area"? They were puzzled and I literally had to explain the concept: "The place where passengers sit between flights." "Oh," they said, faces lighting up, "We have shops and restaurants" pointing at a swath of rapacious upscale joints. "No," I tried to explain, "I mean the place with chairs…" It was hopeless, I finally found the waiting area on my own (no thanks to the confounding signage): a sun-drenched expanse of roasting, stupified passengers sprawled over the seats.

Most often it's incompetence or cynicism by airport managers that's the problem. Back at Bangkok: I went to the gate for my flight at the end of one of the endless concourses. There was a plane there. When they called the flight we walked down the loading arm, only be diverted from the waiting door of the plane down the little metal steps outside. A bus ride later, I lugged my stuff up the metal stairs on another arm. At the plane's door, I sweatily asked the flight attendant: "Is this how you do things?" She smiled and said "yes!" (In six trips through this airport, only once have I actually just gone to a gate and walked onto the plane.)

The lack of respect, the needless hassles and the managerial chaos are some of the reasons that regular people turn into twits or just plain raving lunatics. People's shoulders start going up around their ears as they enter and by the time they've survived parking, check-in, security (Will I get trapped in that plastic booth like the Rock and Roll Creation scene in This is Spinal Tap?), concessions rip-offs and fights over the too few seats, honeymooning couples are thinking divorce and kids are looking for an orphanage.

Just not being ugly - like most airports - isn't necessarily better either. When it opened 20 years ago, Terminal One at O'Hare in Chicago was actually grand. It even had patterns in the carpets to guide traffic flow. But today the wide aisles are filled up with ugly booths and carts selling crap and a cacophony of signs scream from all directions. Passengers are trapped in a carnival of the damned.

Sometimes all you need is mundane and competent. Singapore's architecture is functional at best but they get all the details right. There's lots of free carts for your bags, the concourses are wide, the moving sidewalks all work and you can buy a paper without a line (and that's not even mentioning the swimming pool over Terminal One…)

At SFO, they have serious and in-depth curated exhibits. I didn't think I was interested in one on recorded sound until I recently spent a half hour engrossed in the displays.

I now live in Portland and am happy that the airport here is a good one: a huge canopy over the departures level to keep out the rain, free wi-fi, good restaurants with decent prices; it's not rocket science (although they do have those stupid Smartcarts).

But the worst major airport in the world has got to be Heathrow (with JFK and LAX in hot pursuit for many of the same reasons). Disorganized, draconian and dirty are just

some of its faults (although for depth of filth, Terminal One at De Gaulle in Paris is archaeologic). I recently had to transfer from a flight from the US to one to Dublin. Despite doing my best to follow the haphazard signs through this labyrinth, I got caught up in a mass of people and ended up right back where I started. It was like the circling schools of fish in aquariums. I had to wait in the same security lines and trod the same torn and filthy carpets I'd enjoyed 30 minutes before. I explained my woes and sought escape advice from a security guard, he said: "you and everybody else here get lost mate, we should put up some signs."

Note: Heathrow's Irish flights terminal and I have a history - its empty-can-of-green-beans esthetics aside - when it first opened years ago I was in one of the bathroom stalls and the door fell off its hinges bonking me on the head.

Besides obliterating places to sit and look quietly out the window in favor of shops, Heathrow did one of the most cynical things I've ever seen in an airport. They put up a sign for "gates" in Terminal 3 that actually takes people out of their way (there's a quicker route) and through the duty free shops. It's the yellow brick road to hell.

And this duty-free scam - forcing passengers to walk through (not past) shops - has spread to Vancouver, Melbourne and more.

Sometimes though, airports and their obsession with duty-free get it right. I was at the airport in Dili, East Timor a couple of months ago. The airport has problems finding working light bulbs and it's regularly surrounded by riots. In the departure lounge – and I use the term loosely – the toilets were filthy, a TV was showing a Nazi movie and the only refreshment of any kind, including water, was at the duty free stand: jumbo bottles of booze. For the escaping passengers, it was all we needed.